HOUSTON — A day after a federal court slip-up exposed intimate office e-mail exchanges with his executive secretary, Texas’ most powerful prosecutor, the district attorney of Harris County, issued a public apology Friday to his family and others.
“I deeply regret having said those things,” the prosecutor, Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., said in a statement. “This event has served as a wake-up call to me to get my house in order both literally and figuratively.”
Mr. Rosenthal’s current marriage is his second. His wife, Cindy, is a retired agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The issue took on immediate political dimensions on Thursday when Mr. Rosenthal, a 61-year-old Republican who has announced he will run for a third term next year, attacked the disclosure of the messages as “bare-knuckle politics.”
The messages, which had been turned over to lawyers in the course of a federal civil rights lawsuit that alleges misconduct involving Harris County sheriff’s deputies, contained Mr. Rosenthal’s professions of love and longing for the woman, Kerry Stevens, with whom he has acknowledged having an affair during his first marriage.
In one message dated Aug. 10, Mr. Rosenthal wrote, “The very next time I see you I want to kiss you behind your right ear.”
A day earlier, he had sent Ms. Stevens an e-mail message saying, “You own my heart whether you want or not.”
An opponent of Mr. Rosenthal for district attorney, C. O. Bradford, a Democrat and former Houston police chief, said “the personal use of government property by government officials” was “totally inappropriate.”
Neither Mr. Rosenthal nor Ms. Stevens responded Friday to telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment.
As district attorney of a county with a population of four million, more than that of several states, Mr. Rosenthal also presides over the country’s busiest capital punishment establishment, which has sent 100 convicted murderers to their deaths since 1976.
The e-mail messages were attachments to a brief filed by Mr. Rosenthal’s lawyers seeking to keep the exchanges under seal. When Judge Kenneth Hoyt of Federal District Court in Houston ruled on a motion by KHOU-TV that Mr. Rosenthal’s pleading itself could be made public, the e-mail attachments were inadvertently unsealed briefly.
The filings grew out a civil lawsuit by two brothers, Erik Adam Ibarra and Sean Carlos Ibarra, who claimed that on Jan. 4, 2002, they were beaten after taking pictures of sheriff’s deputies abusing a family during execution of a search warrant. A lawyer for the brothers later claimed that Mr. Rosenthal and the sheriff’s office were looking out for each other, the filings said, as in “I’ll watch your back if you watch mine.”
In that brief filed on Dec. 19, the Ibarra brothers’ lawyer, Lloyd E. Kelley, claimed that Mr. Rosenthal had deleted at least 2,500 e-mail messages after they should have been turned over to the court in the process of legal discovery after Nov. 16.
In his court papers, Mr. Rosenthal has claimed that his e-mail messages came under “zones of privacy” involving personal conduct recognized by the United States Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case in which the court overturned the state’s anti-sodomy law.
But Mr. Kelley’s brief says that it was Mr. Rosenthal who appeared before the court to argue for Texas.
3 comments:
Is anyone surprised that another Christian Republican is a pervert attacking woman. I remember Duck aka Duke Cunningham had his prostitutes and even gave 500 dollars as a bonus. What is with these men it's like this is an open sex country where men just treat woman like trash and other men are allowed to molest kids as long as your a Law Maker in the GOP Party.
Ha! Nice try, bucko. Government owned e-mail can be FOIA'd.
Next time, try Yahoo mail, or whatever it is Rove used.
The knucklehead prosecutor was tinkling in his loins and not thinking straight when he sent those emails to his secretary. And what makes him the Nimrod Prosecutor of the Month is that his current wife is a retired FBI employee.
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